I think there are more than 500k active players...also most of the old one not going to leave this game...more ppls coming too...maybe it can last 10 more years min
Let me guess, the community reached 11 million death in Necropolis. If the average death per player is 300 (half explored, 100 death per path), it's less than 40K players, let's make it 40K.
These are end-game players, but MCOC is a very old game, so end-game players percentage could be higher than other games, my guess is 20%-25%, so the total number of active players could be around 200K, still a lot of but far away from half million.
Off by a factor of at least three, probably four or more.
We know there has to be way more than 250,000 active players in the game, because when events come along like gifting we can see entries on the leaderboard higher than that, and we know no event gets 100% engagement. We can also guestimate from alliance leaderboards. The last time I looked carefully at the war leaderboard was in season 45, and there were over 32000 alliances on the leaderboard. Now, many of them are not full, and some disband and so there is a small amount of double counting that can occur during a season, but if we assume the average alliance is only half full (15 players) that would imply that in season 45 there were at a minimum 450,000 active players. There has to be more, because not all players are in an alliance participating in war (I'm only counting alliances that scored points, not alliances on the board but with zero points who just enlisted but then did nothing). And my estimate of the average alliance being only half full is probably very conservative. Given that, I believe the alliance war leaderboards imply a playerbase of over 600,000 players, and probably closer to 700-900k players.
I also did some experiments with Battlegrounds where I deliberately took low alts and scored ultralow points to see where they would fall on the BG leaderboards. In season 9 a score of 1125 placed 262,865 place. That implies a lot more than 262k players because a) there were a lot of ties at that score, so there were more than 262,865 players at or higher than that score and b) there were even more players scoring below that. Players below certain tiers can't even participate, and not all players who are eligible do, so the BG leaderboard also seems to imply more than half a million players, even assuming more than half of all players in the game participate, which I think is very unlikely. Even during season nine (which had the inflated rewards), I suspect closer to 35% of players actually participate, implying a playerbase of at least 750k (since the vast majority of players on the leaderboards came nowhere near maxing out the milestones, it can't be argued that participation in that season was vastly higher because of reward incentives, although it was almost certainly higher than average).
I'll accept your estimate for Necropolis deaths per path at about 100. It is a reasonable estimate. If *all* of them attempted full explorations that would imply 18,333 Valiants due to Necropolis explorations. But of course, that's unlikely. And I think half of all players completing Necropolis going on to explore is also too high. I'm assuming about 25% of all Necropolis runners eventually went on to explore. That would imply an average of 225 deaths per player, with a total of 48,888 players running Necropolis, and 25% of them or 12,222 players achieving Valiant status from Necropolis exploration. That's not too far from your 40k, but your estimate that 40k represents 25% of the playerbase is definitely far too high. As I said, we can establish unambiguously a player population of at least half a million just from alliance war leaderboards and event participation leaderboards.
Necropolis was only open to Paragon and higher players. It is extremely unlikely (and as calculated, mathematically impossible) for Necropolis players to represent 25% of the playerbase. Paragon players were more likely closer to 10% of the playerbase, which means Necropolis deaths imply something around half a million players. But those were just the Paragons that did Necropolis. It is highly unlikely that every single Paragon player made the attempt. So Necropolis implies a floor of half a million players in the game, but the number is almost certainly much higher than that.
Back in 2017, we know that the game had at least 1.3 million active accounts, because of the Rocket button data. Most players play a single account, so that implies somewhat more than one million players. We know the number cannot realistically be any lower than 500k-600k players as the absolute floor. My guess is that we probably have about 750k-900k active players in the game based on all the available data, which is the general area where several different estimation tracks tend to converge towards.
Honestly I give the game 1-2 more years optimistically. Realistically 6 months to a year more. The gem is riddled with bugs that never get fixed unless it hurts kabam’s pockets. No accountability. Minute transparency. Greed from the marketing team that holds back a vast majority of players. Nothing it seems is tested properly before release anymore and we are basically the beta testers with each new addition to the contest. Every update presents a new bug. Bugs in this game are like hydra. Kill one and 2 more pop up. There are bugs that have persisted for over a year and still are not fixed. Of course with the latest title kabam hid it behind a paywall of course. It’s all about money and that’s going to start drying up unless kabam begins to listen to the community and make real CHANGES THAT BENEFIT THE PLAYER BASE AND NOT THEIR POCKETS. Kabam is milking what little is left of the game’s life cycle at this point and I see the game dead within 1-2 years. Just my 2 cents.
This game is amazing without a doubt...I don't want to game to be close ...but just have a question in my mind...how many years will this game last...if you ask with me ..this game should run minimum 50-60 more yrs haha for sure...this game is amazing thanks kabam!
The oldest online game-as-service style game I ever actually played that is still kicking is Ultima Online which is now almost 27 years old. However, I'm not sure it counts as an actively supported game in the traditional sense. The oldest one I have any experience with that is still actively supported is probably Eve Online, which I first played back in 2003. It is 21 years old now, and while it is down from its peak, it is still pretty active, and still fully supported and being continuously expanded on by its developer/publisher. I'd say 30 years is definitely possible.
To last 50-60 years though, is something difficult to predict because you're entering the territory of whether the game still makes sense in terms of what the world will look like that far into the future. One of the things that killed off much of the PC online gaming space was the invention of mobile gaming which siphoned people's attention away from traditional PC based MMOs and other online games. We still have MMOs and we still have PC online games in general, but it is much tougher sledding today than it was 20 years ago.
Who knows what will arise twenty years from now that might make mobile gaming as quaint as Ultima Online is today.
Also i want to ask what reasons will make this game to be closed...?
Ultimately, lack of interest. Games die when one of three things happens, most of them ultimately connected to falling interest.
1. Player population drops below a critical threshold that makes the game enter a death spiral. Fewer people playing, so the game seems emptier, so fewer players stick around and fewer players join. This is the anti-WoW phenomenon. When World of Warcraft was at its peak, the number one reason people gave for picking up the game and playing it? Their friends were. The same thing can happen in reverse. It always does to some extent, but there is a critical number below which it becomes self-reinforcing. No one knows precisely where this is, until it happens. And sometimes a game can break out of the spiral and stabilize at a lower player population. Eve Online did, dropping from about half a million subs to about 150k subs, adding a free to play option.
2. Game operator decides to shut the game down due to insufficient profitability or potential. Long before a game becomes unprofitable, game operators sometimes decide that even if a game is still profitable, it isn't profitable enough and their resources could be better invested elsewhere. Many games that shut down are still making money and players of those games often do not understand why. But it is not enough to make money, you have to make enough money, or have enough potential to make money, to be worth their time and energy. Sometimes, a game that might survive for years more gets shut down for this reason.
3. Critical misstep. Sometimes a game developer simply makes a particularly egregious miscalculation in the direction of their game, and it sets off a chain reaction that eventually undermines the game and the player community in an irreversible way. Sometimes it is just a monster catastrophe that everyone hates, but in my opinion that's not the worst thing a developer can do. You can try to reverse a change everyone hates. The one that paralyzes dev teams in ways that can be fatal are when you do something that *half* your players hate, and the rest don't hate, and you split the playerbase. Keeping it is bad, reversing it is bad, and while you try to figure out what to do, the playerbase splinters in disgust.
Star Wars Galaxies is, I think, the canonical example of this. And I'll just say here that in my opinion there is *nothing* Kabam has ever done that has come within a million miles of this threshold. Comparing, say, 12.0 with the NGE in Galaxies is like comparing accidentally forgetting where you left your car keys and setting your car on fire.
Ultimately, successful games tend to survive, but the definition of "successful" is a lot more complicated than just "make money." Games don't need a reason to die, they need reasons to survive. When they run out of reasons to survive, they die.
I think there are more than 500k active players...also most of the old one not going to leave this game...more ppls coming too...maybe it can last 10 more years min
Let me guess, the community reached 11 million death in Necropolis. If the average death per player is 300 (half explored, 100 death per path), it's less than 40K players, let's make it 40K.
These are end-game players, but MCOC is a very old game, so end-game players percentage could be higher than other games, my guess is 20%-25%, so the total number of active players could be around 200K, still a lot of but far away from half million.
Off by a factor of at least three, probably four or more.
We know there has to be way more than 250,000 active players in the game, because when events come along like gifting we can see entries on the leaderboard higher than that, and we know no event gets 100% engagement. We can also guestimate from alliance leaderboards. The last time I looked carefully at the war leaderboard was in season 45, and there were over 32000 alliances on the leaderboard. Now, many of them are not full, and some disband and so there is a small amount of double counting that can occur during a season, but if we assume the average alliance is only half full (15 players) that would imply that in season 45 there were at a minimum 450,000 active players. There has to be more, because not all players are in an alliance participating in war (I'm only counting alliances that scored points, not alliances on the board but with zero points who just enlisted but then did nothing). And my estimate of the average alliance being only half full is probably very conservative. Given that, I believe the alliance war leaderboards imply a playerbase of over 600,000 players, and probably closer to 700-900k players.
I also did some experiments with Battlegrounds where I deliberately took low alts and scored ultralow points to see where they would fall on the BG leaderboards. In season 9 a score of 1125 placed 262,865 place. That implies a lot more than 262k players because a) there were a lot of ties at that score, so there were more than 262,865 players at or higher than that score and b) there were even more players scoring below that. Players below certain tiers can't even participate, and not all players who are eligible do, so the BG leaderboard also seems to imply more than half a million players, even assuming more than half of all players in the game participate, which I think is very unlikely. Even during season nine (which had the inflated rewards), I suspect closer to 35% of players actually participate, implying a playerbase of at least 750k (since the vast majority of players on the leaderboards came nowhere near maxing out the milestones, it can't be argued that participation in that season was vastly higher because of reward incentives, although it was almost certainly higher than average).
I'll accept your estimate for Necropolis deaths per path at about 100. It is a reasonable estimate. If *all* of them attempted full explorations that would imply 18,333 Valiants due to Necropolis explorations. But of course, that's unlikely. And I think half of all players completing Necropolis going on to explore is also too high. I'm assuming about 25% of all Necropolis runners eventually went on to explore. That would imply an average of 225 deaths per player, with a total of 48,888 players running Necropolis, and 25% of them or 12,222 players achieving Valiant status from Necropolis exploration. That's not too far from your 40k, but your estimate that 40k represents 25% of the playerbase is definitely far too high. As I said, we can establish unambiguously a player population of at least half a million just from alliance war leaderboards and event participation leaderboards.
Necropolis was only open to Paragon and higher players. It is extremely unlikely (and as calculated, mathematically impossible) for Necropolis players to represent 25% of the playerbase. Paragon players were more likely closer to 10% of the playerbase, which means Necropolis deaths imply something around half a million players. But those were just the Paragons that did Necropolis. It is highly unlikely that every single Paragon player made the attempt. So Necropolis implies a floor of half a million players in the game, but the number is almost certainly much higher than that.
Back in 2017, we know that the game had at least 1.3 million active accounts, because of the Rocket button data. Most players play a single account, so that implies somewhat more than one million players. We know the number cannot realistically be any lower than 500k-600k players as the absolute floor. My guess is that we probably have about 750k-900k active players in the game based on all the available data, which is the general area where several different estimation tracks tend to converge towards.
War leaderboard is overestimated, I had a alt account and put it in an alliance with 3 active players (login at least once a week), we did tiny bit of war for 6 months before I gave up the alt account. There are plenty of alliances are like this.
BG leaderboard is interesting, I wouldn't call account with 1125 points "active", but it is something I didn't check. I wouldn't put money in it but I guess around 50% of 262,865 accounts are actually active. I do agree only 1/3 players actually participate in BG, so this number will land between 300k-400k.
It seems we agreed Necropolis participants are around 40K, I wouldn't argue if you say 20%-25% players is too high, I'm in top tier alliance and 100% of my alliance did 100% of Necropolis, but I know this is not the common situation. Giving MCOC is a very old game, I wouldn't believe number lower than 10%, if you say 20% is too high, I would step back and guess 10%-15%, which also lands to 300K-400K.
The last number I can find is youtube, Seatin is still the most popular youtuber of MCOC, average click is 50K. I assume 80% of them are actually active players, so it's 40K. If 1/5 of MCOC English-speaker players watch his video, it's 200K English-speaker (I think 1/5 is probably too low). If there are 40% players speaking other language, then the total number would be 300K.
So at the end, all numbers point to 300K-400K, which is a lot of a mobile game, but far away from MCOC's prime. I know it's over 1 million a few years ago.
Comments
We know there has to be way more than 250,000 active players in the game, because when events come along like gifting we can see entries on the leaderboard higher than that, and we know no event gets 100% engagement. We can also guestimate from alliance leaderboards. The last time I looked carefully at the war leaderboard was in season 45, and there were over 32000 alliances on the leaderboard. Now, many of them are not full, and some disband and so there is a small amount of double counting that can occur during a season, but if we assume the average alliance is only half full (15 players) that would imply that in season 45 there were at a minimum 450,000 active players. There has to be more, because not all players are in an alliance participating in war (I'm only counting alliances that scored points, not alliances on the board but with zero points who just enlisted but then did nothing). And my estimate of the average alliance being only half full is probably very conservative. Given that, I believe the alliance war leaderboards imply a playerbase of over 600,000 players, and probably closer to 700-900k players.
I also did some experiments with Battlegrounds where I deliberately took low alts and scored ultralow points to see where they would fall on the BG leaderboards. In season 9 a score of 1125 placed 262,865 place. That implies a lot more than 262k players because a) there were a lot of ties at that score, so there were more than 262,865 players at or higher than that score and b) there were even more players scoring below that. Players below certain tiers can't even participate, and not all players who are eligible do, so the BG leaderboard also seems to imply more than half a million players, even assuming more than half of all players in the game participate, which I think is very unlikely. Even during season nine (which had the inflated rewards), I suspect closer to 35% of players actually participate, implying a playerbase of at least 750k (since the vast majority of players on the leaderboards came nowhere near maxing out the milestones, it can't be argued that participation in that season was vastly higher because of reward incentives, although it was almost certainly higher than average).
I'll accept your estimate for Necropolis deaths per path at about 100. It is a reasonable estimate. If *all* of them attempted full explorations that would imply 18,333 Valiants due to Necropolis explorations. But of course, that's unlikely. And I think half of all players completing Necropolis going on to explore is also too high. I'm assuming about 25% of all Necropolis runners eventually went on to explore. That would imply an average of 225 deaths per player, with a total of 48,888 players running Necropolis, and 25% of them or 12,222 players achieving Valiant status from Necropolis exploration. That's not too far from your 40k, but your estimate that 40k represents 25% of the playerbase is definitely far too high. As I said, we can establish unambiguously a player population of at least half a million just from alliance war leaderboards and event participation leaderboards.
Necropolis was only open to Paragon and higher players. It is extremely unlikely (and as calculated, mathematically impossible) for Necropolis players to represent 25% of the playerbase. Paragon players were more likely closer to 10% of the playerbase, which means Necropolis deaths imply something around half a million players. But those were just the Paragons that did Necropolis. It is highly unlikely that every single Paragon player made the attempt. So Necropolis implies a floor of half a million players in the game, but the number is almost certainly much higher than that.
Back in 2017, we know that the game had at least 1.3 million active accounts, because of the Rocket button data. Most players play a single account, so that implies somewhat more than one million players. We know the number cannot realistically be any lower than 500k-600k players as the absolute floor. My guess is that we probably have about 750k-900k active players in the game based on all the available data, which is the general area where several different estimation tracks tend to converge towards.
To last 50-60 years though, is something difficult to predict because you're entering the territory of whether the game still makes sense in terms of what the world will look like that far into the future. One of the things that killed off much of the PC online gaming space was the invention of mobile gaming which siphoned people's attention away from traditional PC based MMOs and other online games. We still have MMOs and we still have PC online games in general, but it is much tougher sledding today than it was 20 years ago.
Who knows what will arise twenty years from now that might make mobile gaming as quaint as Ultima Online is today.
Ultimately, lack of interest. Games die when one of three things happens, most of them ultimately connected to falling interest.
1. Player population drops below a critical threshold that makes the game enter a death spiral. Fewer people playing, so the game seems emptier, so fewer players stick around and fewer players join. This is the anti-WoW phenomenon. When World of Warcraft was at its peak, the number one reason people gave for picking up the game and playing it? Their friends were. The same thing can happen in reverse. It always does to some extent, but there is a critical number below which it becomes self-reinforcing. No one knows precisely where this is, until it happens. And sometimes a game can break out of the spiral and stabilize at a lower player population. Eve Online did, dropping from about half a million subs to about 150k subs, adding a free to play option.
2. Game operator decides to shut the game down due to insufficient profitability or potential. Long before a game becomes unprofitable, game operators sometimes decide that even if a game is still profitable, it isn't profitable enough and their resources could be better invested elsewhere. Many games that shut down are still making money and players of those games often do not understand why. But it is not enough to make money, you have to make enough money, or have enough potential to make money, to be worth their time and energy. Sometimes, a game that might survive for years more gets shut down for this reason.
3. Critical misstep. Sometimes a game developer simply makes a particularly egregious miscalculation in the direction of their game, and it sets off a chain reaction that eventually undermines the game and the player community in an irreversible way. Sometimes it is just a monster catastrophe that everyone hates, but in my opinion that's not the worst thing a developer can do. You can try to reverse a change everyone hates. The one that paralyzes dev teams in ways that can be fatal are when you do something that *half* your players hate, and the rest don't hate, and you split the playerbase. Keeping it is bad, reversing it is bad, and while you try to figure out what to do, the playerbase splinters in disgust.
Star Wars Galaxies is, I think, the canonical example of this. And I'll just say here that in my opinion there is *nothing* Kabam has ever done that has come within a million miles of this threshold. Comparing, say, 12.0 with the NGE in Galaxies is like comparing accidentally forgetting where you left your car keys and setting your car on fire.
Ultimately, successful games tend to survive, but the definition of "successful" is a lot more complicated than just "make money." Games don't need a reason to die, they need reasons to survive. When they run out of reasons to survive, they die.
BG leaderboard is interesting, I wouldn't call account with 1125 points "active", but it is something I didn't check. I wouldn't put money in it but I guess around 50% of 262,865 accounts are actually active. I do agree only 1/3 players actually participate in BG, so this number will land between 300k-400k.
It seems we agreed Necropolis participants are around 40K, I wouldn't argue if you say 20%-25% players is too high, I'm in top tier alliance and 100% of my alliance did 100% of Necropolis, but I know this is not the common situation. Giving MCOC is a very old game, I wouldn't believe number lower than 10%, if you say 20% is too high, I would step back and guess 10%-15%, which also lands to 300K-400K.
The last number I can find is youtube, Seatin is still the most popular youtuber of MCOC, average click is 50K. I assume 80% of them are actually active players, so it's 40K. If 1/5 of MCOC English-speaker players watch his video, it's 200K English-speaker (I think 1/5 is probably too low). If there are 40% players speaking other language, then the total number would be 300K.
So at the end, all numbers point to 300K-400K, which is a lot of a mobile game, but far away from MCOC's prime. I know it's over 1 million a few years ago.